Studying India’s Maha Kumbh Mela Festival

Between 2000 and 2010, the population of Delhi burgeoned from 15 million to 22 million while Shanghai’s population swelled from 14 to 20 million. Compare that to the recent rise of an impromptu city near Allahabad in India: In the week after January 14, 2013, the first day of the Maha Kumbh Mela festival — during which Hindus gather for a sacred bath at the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers — around 10 million people had gathered there.

When the event ends five weeks later, approximately 100 million people would have moved into and out of Allahabad. (I say “approximately” because the precise numbers are difficult to come by.) It took 60 years for the population of Istanbul to grow from one to 10 million, and 50 years in the case of Lagos. At Allahabad, though, the population rose from zero to 10 million, give or take a few million, in just a week’s time.

That’s a slightly unfair comparison because the local government isn’t going to put in place all the fixtures of a functional metropolis. However, it’s only partly unfair. The Indian authorities do have to pull off the creation of a huge temporary tent city with minimal mishap. An enormous amount of urban planning, civil engineering, governance and adjudication, and maintenance of public goods — physical ones like toilets as well as intangibles such as law and order — and plans to deal with unexpected events goes into the creation of this city. Those are pretty much the main elements surrounding the creation of any city in the world.

There will also be a reasonably efficient dissolution of the city when the Kumbh Mela ends in late February, but that’s another story. Some cities have declined over time, but I can’t even imagine what it would take for one of the world’s major metropolises to unwind.

The mammoth people flows at Allahabad got me excited when two colleagues at Harvard University, religion professor Diana Eck and design professor Rahul Mehrotra, broached the idea of studying the Maha Kumbh Mela some months ago. As a child growing up in India, I had read about the festival, but had never entertained the idea of visiting it or studying it. Having lived outside India for over two decades, I now find myself in a position to revisit the event, intellectually and physically.

The flows of humanity that my colleagues and I will study during the five weeks of the Kumbh Mela will shed light on similar events, such as responses to unexpected events, disasters, and the like, that will take decades to unfold in other metropolises. Some researchers are social anthropologists, in effect, following key officials during the Mela to unmask the processes that allow efficient and rapid decision making. In a sense, the festival is a laboratory setting that scientists of all sorts constantly look for. While there are other large gatherings of folks, such as the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, those are a tenth of the size in terms of the number of participants.

Another issue of interest is the emergence of social structure in complex groupings. The Kumbh Mela authorities put down some bright lines on who gets to go where, when, and how — for example, rules that govern people’s movements during some religious days — and some rules are determined by long-standing customs. Other, more informal norms among disparate groups of people seem to emerge quickly. To those interested in how cooperation among diverse groups happens, this is a fortuitous setting.

This is also the first Big Data Kumbh, as I call it. With cellphone usage ubiquitous in India, the millions of cellphones at the Kumbh Mela will act as mobile sensors. My colleagues and I have undertaken, with the help of local cellular providers and government authorities, to amass, arguably, the biggest ever telecom data set.

To imagine the uses to which researchers could put the data, consider these hypothetical ideas. The data could be used to understand how untoward incidents have been contained. After all, the Maha Kumbh Mela has managed to prevent major disasters for a long time. Why don’t disasters spiral out of control when massive numbers of people, unfamiliar with each other, are involved? Can we spot the signatures of an incipient disaster in the data, and the process by which those signals are attenuated rather than amplified?

There is much commerce, as well as charitable exchange, of goods and services at the Kumbh Mela. How do vendors deal with the inevitable errors in forecasting demand? Do inter-vendor communication patterns allow the collective containment of uncertainties? Indeed, the telecom data generated at the Kumbh Mela should provide grist to the intellectual mills of statisticians, engineers, mathematicians, and social scientists for a long time, and allow us to model the use of this kind of Big Data.

We’ll report on our findings here over the coming weeks.

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, the director of Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute, and the author of Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries (Berrett-Koehler, 2018).